All of the Hand Fund’s activities are performed by volunteers, with a primary mission to financially support applied scientific research and development of hand and arm prostheses and orthoses.
Motivation
There are many foundations that support scientific research for almost every body part and for almost every disease. However, a foundation for hand- and arm deficiencies did not exist yet. That is strange. From the media one gets the impression that all problems in upper limb prosthetics and orthotics have already been solved. This is however not the case.
Prostheses
Worldwide there are many people who miss a part of their hand or arm. This can be caused by an amputation or by a congenital reduction deficiency. The current available hand and arm prostheses only provide a limited functionality. Furthermore using one of the current prostheses often causes several problems, e.g. the prosthesis is too heavy, or it is regularly broken. As a result half of the people with a reduction deficiency prefers not to wear a prosthesis at all (Biddiss, 2007). This, on its turn, might result in overuse of the healthy arm.
Orthoses
For people who do have an arm, but are not able to use it, orthoses are available. An orthosis supports the movement or positioning of the arm, e.g. in case of a brachial plexus injury or muscular disease. Unfortunately most of the orthoses only offer passive support. An orthosis supports the positioning of the hand. However it does not restore the grasp function of the hand.
Research
Currently, much of the performed research often does not lead to an improvement for the end user of a prosthesis or orthosis. Most of the prototypes never make it out of the walls of the research institution or university. The Hand Fund also observes that many effective solutions are not being further developed due to a lack of funding, and wants to change this.
The Hand Fund would like to see better hand- and arm prostheses and orthoses becoming available. They should be easy to operate, lightweight, and are seldom broken. Therefore the Hand Fund supports research and development of prostheses and orthoses that meet these user demands.
Approach
The primary mission of the The Hand Fund is to collect funding for scientific research on prostheses and orthoses for hands and arms.
All activities are performed by volunteers, so the Hand Fund is fully dependent of donations which can directly be used for research purposes. Additionally, the Hand Fund primarily focuses on applied and independent research which brings results to the end user on a short term (within 2-5 years).
Our main approach can be translated in what we think the main question in research should be:
“How does the end user benefit from this research?”
Board
As of June 2015, the board of the Hand Fund consists of:
Chairman: Dr.ir. G. Smit
Secretary: Dr.ir. D.H. Plettenburg
Treasurer: Ir. R.A. Bos
ANBI
The Hand Fund is acknowledged, by the Dutch Internal Revenue Service, being a foundation serving the public interest (ANBI-organization).